Rebel without a pause: Trump forged a frenetic first year

President Trump kicked off his first year back in office with an Inauguration Day for the record books, signing 26 executive orders that erased much of his predecessor’s legacy and began his own quest to remake the federal bureaucracy in his image.

It was a torrential pace of action that, while it has slowed, has still outdone all his predecessors for sheer frenzy.

Mr. Trump’s first year saw him solve the border, slap tariffs on the entire globe, sign a law to continue his first-term tax cuts, launch a campaign to carry out “mass deportations,” usher more than 200,000 federal employees out the door, shutter some government agencies, broker a fragile peace deal in Gaza and authorize military strikes on Iran’s nuclear program and Venezuelan drug boats.

He’s repaired military recruitment, bulldozed the White House’s East Wing and dethroned the Associated Press from its perch as the pinnacle of media covering the White House.

“Certainly he’s more frenetic than previous presidents. That seems clear,” said Andrew Busch, associate director at the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee. “He has quite a bit of a showman to his character. I think he’s determined to win every news cycle. I think he’s determined to be the No. 1 subject in every news cycle.”

But, save for the glaring example of the border, where illegal immigration has ceased, the flurry of activity hasn’t necessarily translated to accomplishments, said one Republican official who worked in the first Trump White House.

“The pace of actual changes hasn’t been that torrid. The amount of noise has been deafening, making it difficult to think,” he said. “Spending remains the same. Taxes remain the same. The regulatory structure remains the same. When we cave on the tax credits that make insurers rich, health care will remain the same. Our foreign policy remains pretty much the same.”

“If the president brought the same kind of focus to policy changes that he has brought to remodeling [the White House], he’d be the most consequential president in our lifetimes. But that is clearly not to be,” the official said.

Mr. Trump’s outside-the-box approach has, at least, kept the federal courts busy.

The federal district court for Washington, where many of the major challenges to Mr. Trump have been filed, has notched a record caseload this year, with more than 4,300 civil cases filed as of the middle of December. The court had never topped the 4,000 mark before.

The judges have bedeviled the president with hundreds of restraining orders and injunctions blocking his policies.

He’s done somewhat better at the circuit appeals courts, and dramatically better at the Supreme Court, which has allowed him to pursue aggressive immigration arrests and deportations, to fire heads of independent agencies, and to withhold some government spending.

Take Mr. Trump’s move to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development. After an initial court blockade, the agency’s employees were recalled from abroad and those at its headquarters in Washington were booted from their offices.

The Partnership for Public Service said that as of Nov. 18, more than 200,000 civilian government employees had left the federal workforce. The majority of those came in July and August, according to the partnership’s data.

Some percentage of those employees worked in the area of diversity, equity and inclusion — which was a focus of the Biden administration, but is anathema to the Trump team. Mr. Trump moved to fire the employees, erase DEI-infused language in federal communications and strike DEI carve-outs in government programs.

At the White House itself, Mr. Trump has embarked on controversial construction and challenged the primacy of The Associated Press, relegating the storied wire service to the same status as newspapers.

Elsewhere, he’s won legal settlements from ABC News and Paramount, the parent company of CBS News. He’s also watched with glee as CBS announced the end of Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” and ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel — though that network quickly retreated and brought him back, giving him a new deal to last through 2027.

Mr. Trump already has seen at least four impeachment resolutions formally introduced against him in the House, and two of those — both from Rep. Al Green, Texas Democrat, have faced votes in the full House chamber. They both were defeated.

President Biden saw seven impeachment resolutions filed in 2021, though Republicans didn’t force a floor vote on any of them.

Gallup’s polling has shown Mr. Trump steadily losing the approval of voters. His job approval rating has fallen from 47% at inauguration to 36% in November, nearing his all-time low of 34% as he left office in January 2021.

Mr. Busch, the political scientist at the Baker School, said Mr. Trump’s pace of action has upsides and downsides.

Bad news for Mr. Trump disappears quickly, subsumed by the next crisis or accomplishment. But good news also doesn’t linger very long, denying Mr. Trump the victory laps he’s so eager to take.

He pointed to Mr. Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, which dominated headlines for the first months of the new administration, making grandiose claims about cuts to government.

Mr. Busch said Mr. Trump isn’t the first president to create a task force or commission to reimagine the bureaucracy — then-Vice President Al Gore led one in the 1990s, and before that President Reagan had the Grace Commission. But those took months, or years, to come up with recommendations, which were then sent to Congress, which debated them and passed some parts.

“In this case, you had this DOGE created, and it conducted its businesses in this frenetic way and they kind of disappeared,” Mr. Busch said. The president’s order creating DOGE envisioned it operating through July 4, 2026.

That effort, like so much of Mr. Trump’s work, was unilateral. Other than the summer’s Big Beautiful Bill budget law and January’s Laken Riley Act to require detention of some illegal immigrants, little of Mr. Trump’s agenda has gone through Congress.

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a longtime voice in Washington conservative circles, called the budget law’s tax cuts the “biggest affirmative win” of the first year.

Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive and New York governor hopeful, added to that list the border, peace deals and lowering energy prices.

“He’s accomplished more in 11 months than most presidents have done in eight years. So he’s tireless. He has shown a strength and fortitude that is almost superhuman,” Mr. Blakeman said.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt ticked off the economy, the border and Mr. Trump’s makeover of the bureaucracy.

“Every day is a challenge when you’re up against fake news and the Democrats, but I think the president has accomplished what he said he was going to accomplish in just record time,” she said.

Mr. Norquist said he wished Mr. Trump had taken a different approach with tariffs. He said they were supposed to be a negotiating tool, but instead have become an economic hindrance.

Democrats who spoke to The Times credited Mr. Trump for the Gaza peace deal and the return of hostages, including some Americans.

But their list of objections with the first year was extensive.

“I think they’ve missed a lot of incredible opportunities. I wish there wasn’t a big beautiful bill. For me, one of the lows was shutting our government down. For me, that was very, very distressing to be at that point because that’s a fail,” said Sen. John Fetterman, Pennsylvania Democrat.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer, New Jersey Democrat, also cited tariffs, rising prices of services such as child care, and the lack of action on health care.

Analysts compared this first year to Mr. Trump’s first term and said he came in more ready, with a more unified team.

“He may have wanted to be as active in his first term, but he was really restrained in some ways by the fact that he didn’t really know Washington and a lot of folks in his administration were deeply tied to the Republican establishment,” Mr. Busch said.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told The Times that Mr. Trump assembled a much stronger team this time around, fueling the historic year.

“I think he’s doing so many different things that I think it’s very hard for a normal person to understand the larger picture because every day, we have three or four new things,” Mr. Gingrich said.

• Jeff Mordock and Kerry Picket contributed to this article.